Two Williams Seniors Named Watson Fellows

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WILLIAMSTOWN, Mass. — Williams College seniors Aseel Abulhab and Nathan Miller have been named Thomas J. Watson Fellows for 2015-16 and will each receive a $30,000 grant supporting a year of purposeful, independent study outside the United States.

Abulhab and Miller join 48 other students selected from nearly 700 candidates nationwide. This year’s class comes from eight countries and 19 states, and in the coming year they’ll traverse 78 countries exploring a wide range of topics.

Abulhab, a history major, grew up in Michigan, where she was first drawn to the grace of American Sign Language (ASL) in high school. After taking an ASL class, she discovered new ways to understand disability, and she began to question the way society treats the deaf. At Williams, she founded Williams Signs, a club dedicated to understanding deaf culture and the study of ASL. In the summer of 2014, she held an internship at the Muslim Public Affairs Council in Washington, D.C., and she studied in London during her junior year. Abulhab is interested in the international deaf community and the types and quality of education available to deaf children around the world.

Abulhab’s project, “Reconstructing Deafness: An Education in Silence,” will take her to Finland, Jordan, South Africa, and Costa Rica, where she will work to foster relationships with the hearing and deaf communities and work with deaf students.

“I will listen to their stories of both struggle and triumph in their educational journeys,” Abulhab says. “I want to consider the effects of international human rights discourse on deaf individuals, and to what extent this discourse affects their daily lives. I hope that by immersing myself in specialized schools for the deaf, I will begin to chip away at the walls that our societies have built between the able-bodied and the disabled.”



Nathan Miller grew up in New York City, where he became interested in music production at age 12, turning household objects into recordable instruments. Using a personal computer and rudimentary equipment, he soon began producing his own compositions. At Williams, he is a computer science major who has studied music, poetry, and visual art. He spent the spring of his junior year in south India studying both the classical and folk music traditions of the region. While there, he took tens of hours of field recordings that he arranged into an album that he hoped would be both “sonically gripping and ethnographically relevant.”

Miller’s project, “Creative Spaces: Exploring Artistic Processes in Folk Music Culture,” will take him to Zimbabwe, Serbia, Indonesia and Japan.

“I want to explore the creative process as an act of problem solving and learn how artists in different musical traditions approach the problem of creating good art,” he says. “Music from different parts of the world varies greatly in structure, rhythm, harmony, and performance, but there is an equally profound difference in the artistic approaches that engender these variations. I am eager to explore the practices and philosophies of making music, how these ideals shape a musician’s identity, and the responsibility of these musicians to both preserve and appropriate tradition.”

The Thomas J. Watson Fellowship was established in 1968. It offers recent college graduates an opportunity to engage their deepest interests on a world scale before beginning their professional lives. Fellows conceive original projects and execute them outside of the U.S. for a full year. Recent Watson fellows include Eloise Andry ’14, Ali Mctar ’14, Abdullah Awad ’13, Emmanuel Whyte ’13, Lindsay Olsen ’12, and Emanuel Yekutiel ’11.

 


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Letter: Vote for Someone Other Than Trump

Letter to the Editor

To the Editor:

I urge my Republican friends to vote for someone other than Donald Trump in November. His rallies are getting embarrassingly sparse and his speeches more hostile and confused. He's looking desperately for money, now selling poor-quality gold sneakers for $399. While Trump's online fans embrace him more tightly, more and more of the people who actually worked with Trump have broken with him, often issuing statements denouncing his motives, intellect, and patriotism.

Mike Pence is the most recent, but the list now includes William Barr, former attorney general (who compared him to a 9-year-old); former NSC Chairs Bolton and McMaster; former Defense Secretaries Mattis and Esper; former Chiefs of Staff Kelly and Mulvaney; former Secretary of State Tillerson; former Homeland Security chief Bossert; and former Chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Mark Milley, who referred to Trump as a "wannabe dictator." This level of rejection by former colleagues is unprecedented in American politics.

Are these people just cozying up to the Establishment "Uniparty," as his fans would have it? No. Most of them are retired from politics. It's just that they see the danger most clearly. General Milley is right. Trump's most constant refrain is his desire to hurt his critics, including traditional conservatives. Although Liz Cheney lost her Wyoming seat in Congress, he now wants her jailed for investigating him.

This man should not be president of the USA.

Jim Mahon
Williamstown, Mass.

 

 

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